Download or read book Nested Games of External Democracy Promotion written by Rainer Thiel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nested Games of External Democracy Promotion develops a game theoretic model that explains how an external actor influences the strategic interaction between an authoritarian regime and a democratic opposition. In a multiple arena approach, the confrontation between regime and opposition on the domestic level is nested inside a game on the international level, at which the regime is simultaneously entangled with a democracy promotion actor. As a case study, the book formally reconstructs how United States democracy assistance influenced the Polish liberalization process between 1980 and 1989. The process tracing of its causal mechanisms is extensive and builds on data previously not recorded. With regard to Cold War history, new light is brought into U.S. American policies and strategies behind the Iron Curtain.
Download or read book Fictional Games written by Stefano Gualeni and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What roles do imaginary games have in story-telling? Why do fiction authors outline the rules of a game that the audience will never play? Combining perspectives from philosophy, literary theory and game studies, this book provides the first in-depth investigation into the significance of fictional games within fictional worlds. Drawing from contemporary cinema and literature, from The Hunger Games to the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone introduce five key functions that different types of imaginary games have in worldbuilding. First, fictional games can emphasize the dominant values and ideologies of the fictional society they belong to. Second, some imaginary games function in fictional worlds as critical, utopian tools, inspiring shifts in the thinking and political orientation of the fictional characters. Third, a few fictional games are conducive to the transcendence of a particular form of being, such as the overcoming of human corporeality. Fourth, imaginary games within works of fiction can deceptively blur the boundaries between the contingency of play and the irrevocable seriousness of “real life”, either camouflaging life as a game or disguising a game as something with more permanent consequences. And fifth, they can function as meta-reflexive tools, suggesting critical and/or satirical perspectives on how actual games are designed, played, sold, manipulated, experienced, understood and utilized as part of our culture. With illustrations in every chapter bringing the imaginary games to life, Gualeni and Fassone creatively inspire us to consider fictional games anew: not as moments of playful reprieve in a storyline, but as significant and multi-layered expressive devices.
Download or read book The Nested Games of Brexit written by Agnès Alexandre-Collier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a novel perspective on the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, providing insights to the ways in that domestic concerns interact with European policy to produce sometimes counter-intuitive outcomes. The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for both political parties in the UK. This innovative volume considers the extent to which the interrelation between the national and the European arenas produced significant opportunities for reshaping political action. The nesting of these two levels matters, firstly in allowing for the mobilisation of domestic actors around European issues and secondly, in explaining why seemingly unimportant or counter-productive actions are taken. The tensions this generated reached a critical juncture with the referendum, a rupture that highlights the extent to which a nominally second-order vote can have fundamental impacts on the first order’s preferences. Bringing together scholars from a wide range of approaches and covering various aspects of the Brexit process, this book offers a significant contribution to improving our understanding of an event that will shape British and European politics for a generation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.
Download or read book Nested Games written by George Tsebelis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-08-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clearly written and easily understood by the nonspecialist, Nested Games provides a systematic, empirically accurate, and theoretically coherent account of apparently irrational political actions.
Download or read book The Road To Maastricht written by Kenneth Dyson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-10-28 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic and monetary union in the European Union represents a massive change for Europe and for the world. The Road to Maastricht identifies why the agreement was possible and how the agreement was made. The book examines the motives that inspired European political leaders, the strategies that they pursued, and the institutions that were used to achieve monetary union. Drawing on a wide range of sources and unprecedented research and interviews, the book combines careful political analysis with new information about the way in which European Monetary Union was negotiated. It delves into the complex forces at work in Europe, including the cross-national political interactions, to produce an authoritative account of the boldest and riskiest venture in the history of European integration.
Download or read book After War written by Christopher J. Coyne and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-conflict reconstruction is one of the most pressing political issues today. This book uses economics to analyze critically the incentives and constraints faced by various actors involved in reconstruction efforts. Through this analysis, the book will aid in understanding why some reconstructions are more successful than others.
Download or read book Conflict Amid Consensus in American Trade Policy written by Martha Liebler Gibson and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have witnessed inconsistent and seemingly dramatic turnabouts in legislators' attitudes toward trade, with strong bipartisan support for free trade and the Uruguay Round in one instant and heated debate over participation in the World Trade Organization the next. Martha L. Gibson systematically traces the competing forces that interject conflict into an overall consensus on the value of a liberalized trade policy. Cutting through the tangled web of congressional politics, Gibson shows why it is impossible to understand trade legislation without first understanding how electoral politics and the institutional rules of Congress distort legislators' interests, incentives, and policy goals. Gibson's book clearly shows that trade legislation is not made in a vacuum but is just one in a series of simultaneous games with competing goals in which legislators engage to satisfy the conflicting demands of constituents.
Download or read book Life Is a Game written by Edward Castronova and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if life is a game? Are you winning? Have you even decided what 'winning' is? Game design could be defined in many ways, but here the term is used to denote the practice of creating choices. Designing a game, in this sense, involves crafting limits, rewards, incentives, and risks in such a way that the person who interacts with the game – the player – makes choices that have consequences. Edward Castronova urges readers to think about the fundamentals of the human condition and compare them to different games that we all know. In some ways, life is like an idle game: providing unchallenging distractions that fit easily into a person's daily routine. In other ways, life is like the game Minesweeper: You poke in different places to learn about what you don't know, taking care to avoid big explosions. Or, life is like a role-playing game: You adopt a persona and speak your part, always seeking adventure. Bringing together questions relating to diverse fields – such as politics, economics, sociology and philosophy - Castronova persuades readers to broaden the scope of game design to answer questions about life's everyday obstacles. The object of this book is to take seriously the idea that life is a game. The goal is not to make readers wealthier or healthier. Its goal is to go on a journey into the human condition, with game design as a guide.
Download or read book Dynamic Noncooperative Game Theory written by Tamer Basar and published by SIAM. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the analysis of dynamic/differential zero-sum and nonzero-sum games and the role of different information patterns.
Download or read book Divided Power written by Donald R. Kelley and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Polycentric Games and Institutions written by Michael Dean McGinnis and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses game theory to model institutions
Download or read book The Politics of Institutional Choice written by Steven S. Smith and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Events in Russia since the late 1980s have created a rare opportunity to watch the birth of democratic institutions close at hand. Here Steven Smith and Thomas Remington provide the first intensive, theoretically grounded examination of the early development of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federation's parliament created by the 1993 constitution. They offer an integrated account of the choices made by the newly elected members of the Duma in establishing basic operating arrangements: an agenda-setting governing body, a standing committee system, an electoral law, and a party system. Not only do these decisions promise to have lasting consequences for the post-communist Russian regime, but they also enable the authors to test assumptions about politicians' goals from the standpoint of institutional theory. Smith and Remington challenge in particular the notion, derived from American contexts, that politicians pursue a single, overarching goal in the creation of institutions. They argue that politicians have multiple political goals--career, policy, and partisan--that drive their choices. Among Duma members, the authors detect many cross currents of interests, generated by the mixed electoral system, which combines both single-member districts and proportional representation, and by sharp policy divisions and an emerging party system. Elected officials may shift from concentrating on one goal to emphasizing another, but political contexts can help determine their behavior. This book brings a fresh perspective to numerous theories by incorporating first-hand accounts of major institutional choices and placing developments in their actual context.
Download or read book Ruling Oneself Out written by Ivan Ermakoff and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Pétain (Vichy, France, July 1940)—Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment. Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.
Download or read book The Cold War and the 1984 Olympic Games written by Philip D’Agati and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games is explained as the result of a complex series of events and policies that culminated in a strategic decision to not participate in Los Angeles. Using IR framework, D'Agati developes and argues for the concept of surrogate wars as an alternative means for conflict between states.
Download or read book Negotiating the New Europe written by Dimitris Papadimitriou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2002: Offering a new and challenging perspective on how the European Union (EU) sought to structure its relations with Central and Southeast Europe after the Cold War, this volume draws upon key debates in both politics and international relations. A historically and theoretically informed examination of the EU's engagement in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989, the book combines conceptual rigour with clear empirical analysis, firmly grounding the study of the European Union's current enlargement process in established theoretical perspectives. The book is written in an engaging and accessible way, which will appeal to academics, students and practitioners alike.
Download or read book A Constitution of the People and How to Achieve It written by Aarif Abraham and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain does not have a written constitution. It has rather, over centuries, developed a set of miscellaneous conventions, rules, and norms that govern political behavior. By contrast, Bosnia’s constitution was written, quite literally, overnight in a military hanger in Dayton, USA, to conclude a devastating war. By most standards it does not work and is seen to have merely frozen a conflict and all development with it. What might these seemingly unrelated countries be able to teach each other? Britain, racked by recent crises from Brexit to national separatism, may be able to avert long-term political conflict by understanding the pitfalls of writing rigid constitutional rules without popular participation or the cultivation of good political culture. Bosnia, in turn, may be able to thaw its frozen conflict by subjecting parts of its written constitution to amendment, with civic involvement, on a fixed and regular basis; a ’revolving constitution’ to replicate some of that flexibility inherent in the British system. A book not just about Bosnia and Britain; a standard may be set for other plural, multi-ethnic polities to follow.
Download or read book Generating Predictability written by Christoph Engel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-17 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human behaviour is infinitely complex, the result of thousands of interactions between predispositions, external factors and physical and cognitive processes. It is also highly unpredictable, which makes meaningful social engagement difficult without the aid of some external framework such as that offered by an institution. Both formal and informal institutions can provide the element of predictability necessary for successful, complex interactions, a factor which is often overlooked by institutional analysts and designers. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines including psychology, economics, and sociological and political studies, this book develops a coherent and accessible theory for explaining the unpredictability of individual behaviour. The author then highlights the danger of institutional reforms undermining the very capacity to generate predictability which is so central to their success. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and professionals in many fields including management studies, behavioural economics and the new, interdisciplinary field of institutional design.
